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Scale-out virgin Fujitsu pushes out high-performing tool

Terabyte per second throughput: Out-scales SONAS

SNW Europe The scale-out file computing world has a new player: Fujitsu. The company has just pushed out its FEFS product in Japan.

Fujitsu FEFS is a terabyte per second scale-out file system for high-performance computing. It could come westwards and provide competition for SONAS, EMC Isilon, and other big data file systems.

FEFS stands for Fujitsu Exabyte File System and it has been developed from Lustre. The thing scales to 8EB, eight thousand petabytes, and supports from a few dozen servers up to one million. Fujitsu says it enables high-speed parallel distributed processing of very large amounts of read/write transactions from the compute nodes in an X86 HPC cluster.

FEFS can be configured with 10,000 storage systems delivering what Fujitsu claims is the world's highest throughput of 1 TB/sec. The file-system can create several tens of thousands of files per second. Its metadata management is up to three times faster than basic Lustre, according to Fujitsu.

Fujitsu's Marcus Schneider, director of storage product marketing, said: "FEFS is a scale out computer running a Lustre-based filesystem. We made it dramatically more scalable, and hardened the product very much. It is a pure HPC play, an outstanding enhancement to Lustre. In Europe we acquired a German company specialising in high-performance computing: HPC Aachen. I was very impressed by the work they have done."

That suggests that we'll be seeing FEFS in Europe. If you want a FEFS system in Japan, Fujitsu will supply it with Primergy X86 servers and Eternus storage arrays. The smallest configuration is four Primergy RX300 S6 servers with InfiniBand connections, three Eternus DX80 S2 storage units, and a FEFS licence. The price starts from ¥21,430,000 ($274,570.17.) ®